


A FitzSimmons Family Therapy Session (but not really)

by Highclasstrash



Series: Tumblr Prompts by Highclasstrashposts [13]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Deke Shaw Needs a Hug, F/M, Family Fluff, Gen, Kree (Marvel), Past Violence, Worried FitzSimmons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:22:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26056405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Highclasstrash/pseuds/Highclasstrash
Summary: anonymous prompted:  "(i hope im not sending too many prompts, i have so many deke feels after tonight so im throwing them at you, if its too much ignore me!!) maybe something where deke accidently talks about his childhood a bit to fitzsimmons? like, an expansion of what we know in canon and how horrible it was. like (forgive me if im wrong my s5 memory isnt perfect lol) but im pretty sure he was a slave for a huge part of his life and that isnt spoken about much"
Relationships: Deke Shaw & Jemma Simmons, Leo Fitz & Deke Shaw, Leo Fitz & Deke Shaw & Jemma Simmons, Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Series: Tumblr Prompts by Highclasstrashposts [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1774090
Comments: 11
Kudos: 62





	A FitzSimmons Family Therapy Session (but not really)

Jemma Simmons was having as good of a day she could, having just time traveled and being a fugitive of the law, hiding in a huge underground bunker nobody knew about.

Her day got immensely worse when she entered the Lighthouse lab and saw the teams newest member, and her grandson from the future, digging a knife into his own arm.

"Deke!" Jemma rushed forward, grabbing a towel and going to take the knife away from him.

Deke Shaw looked up, breaking his concentrated grimace with a slightly curious look. "What?"

"What are you doing?" Jemma wrapped his bloody wrist with the towel.

"I'm taking my metric out." Deke set his knife down. "Is that supposed to be a big deal?"

Jemma furrowed her brow, carefully pulled the bloody towel away and inspected the cut. Sure enough, the circular metric was gone. The work was careful and delicate, and there wasn't as much blood as there should have been for an inexperienced cut.

"I thought you were hurting yourself." She said quietly. "I'm sorry."

Deke awkwardly wiped his bloody left hand on his pants. "It's fine, don't worry."

"Where did you learn to do this with such precision?" Jemma leaned down to look at the cut more carefully. It looked like it was made by an experienced surgeon.

Deke shrugged and grabbed a roll of bandages from the table next to him. "I picked it up as a kid. My mom was kind of like the doctor of the Lighthouse."

"This is amazing work." Jemma complimented. "But, doesn't it hurt?"

"Not really, no." Deke shook his head and started unrolling the bandages. "I have a high pain tolerance."

Jemma quickly grabbed the bandages and started wrapping his wrist for him. "Really?" She looked at him with concern. "Since when?"

Deke carelessly wiped the blood off the blade of his version of Fitzs multi tool with a small smile. "Oh, you know. The Kree weren't exactly benevolent leaders." He retracted the blade and put the knife in his pocket, smiling like he just made a hilarious joke.

Jemmas hands froze as she thought about the implications behind that statement. Deke took the opportunity to finish wrapping his wrist and start walking out. 

"Bye, Nana!" He called cheerfully over his shoulder as he crossed the threshold of the door.

\- - - 

Fitz sighed and slammed his fist on the door. Locked. All the system updates that locked down the Lighthouse were getting very annoying.

"What's wrong?" Deke Shaw, Fitzs overeager grandson from the future, was leaning against the concrete wall.

"Bloody door's locked again." Fitzs frustration was abundant in his voice. "I need to get to the other end of the level." He held up a satchel full of papers he needed to get to the lab.

Deke smiled. "I can help." He walked over to the vent on the floor, slid his fingers between the grates and pulled. He set it against the wall and gestured to the new hole in the wall. "Do you have a problem with small spaces?"

Fitz stared. "You want me to crawl through the vent?"

"I know my way through the whole vent system, I can get you anywhere you need to go." Deke crouched down and looked through the dark tunnel, then up at his grandfather. "Unless you want to wait?"

Fitz sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose, then gestured to the vent. "Lead the way."

The vent shafts were larger than Fitz thought they would be, not quite wide enough for the two men to sit side by side, but tall enough for them to sit comfortably. But, they did not sit. Fitz could barely keep up with Deke, despite only being a few years older.

"Deke, slow down." Fitz called ahead, leaning back on his heals. 

Deke stopped and turned around. "Sorry." He said sheepishly and crawled back to Fitz. 

"Why are you in such a rush?" Fitz cracked his stiff neck.

"Force of habit, sorry." Deke apologized again. "I'm usually running when I'm in here."

That set off an alarm bell in Fitzs mind. "Running?"

"Yeah," Deke said like he wasn't talking about something important, "the Blues had some sort of vendetta against me or something. I think people made bets on how far I could go without getting caught." Fitz stared in shock. "My record is four levels."

"Were you okay when that happened?" Fitz asked carefully.

"No, of course not." Deke turned his head away. "Let's get going, you said you have something important, right?"

He did not wait for an answer, just started off in the direction that would lead to the lab. Fitz sighed, filed away that information to talk to his wife about later, and followed his grandson 

\- - - 

"Ta-da!" Deke kicked the grate of the vent out and climbed out. He stood up and spread his arms out to show off his feat of navigation.

"Thank you, Deke." Fitz tossed his satchel to his grandson before climbing out and fixing the vent cover over the gaping hole. "I think I'll just wait next time."

Deke shrugged and handed the satchel over. "I get that. I usually only used the vents if I was in real danger."

"But you . . ." Fitz frowned, "you memorized the whole layout?"

"You've seen this place in eighty years." Deke started casually walking to the lab. "You know how often 'real danger' is."

Fitz stood frozen for a few seconds, staring at the back of his grandsons head. Then, he practically ran to the lab.

"Jemma," Fitz ran a hand through his hair and leaned against the open door, "has Deke said anything that's made you concerned in the time you've known him?"

Jemma looked up from what she was doing, worry flitting across her face. "What did he tell you?"

"Did you know that our grandson has the ventilation schematics memorized?" Fitz walked forward and lowered his voice. "Just in case he needed to run from the Kree." 

Jemmas eyes widened. "Oh, my God."

"What did he tell _you?_ " Fitz sat on one of the cots, the papers of research all but forgotten at his side.

"I found him digging his own metric out of his arm with a knife." Jemma leaned in, like this conversation was a secret to keep from the rest of the base. "But it didn't seem to hurt him, he told me he has a high pain tolerance." She sighed. "He implied the Kree would hurt him regularly, and he said it like it was no big deal." 

Fitz sighed and scratched his neck. "What should we do?" He looked up his wife. "He shouldn't live in this world and expect it to be just like his."

Jemma nodded. "None of us are really qualified to act as therapists, but we should talk to him."

"I know this isn't the place I grew up in." 

Both Fitz and Simmons spun around to look at the source of the voice. Deke was standing in the door.

"Deke!" Jemma stepped forward, as if to act like she wasn't just talking about him.

"I'm not naive." Deke continued. "I know this isn't the Lighthouse I'm used to."

Fitz put his hands up in a placating manor. "We never m--"

"I don't make a big deal out of my past because I don't want _you guys_ to make a big deal out of it." Deke cut Fitz off. "I know my childhood was messed up. Believe me, _I know_."

"Why don't you want us to make a big deal about it?" Jemma asked. "You went through Hell."

"Yeah." Deke nodded. "I did. But this isn't the same place, and I want to move on with my life."

"Deke," Fitz started calmly, "it's not that easy."

"You can't just bottle everything away and expect to be fine." Jemma added. 

"I'm very good at compartmentalizing." Deke crossed his arms.

"Compartmentalization isn't good for you." Fitz said. "Trust me, it's not."

Deke sighed. "If you knew what it was like to grow up in this place, you wouldn't want to think about it either."

Jemma walked over and placed her hand on her grandsons shoulder. "There are some things in life you have to face to move past."

"I am moving past things." Deke said stubbornly. "I'm making new, better memories where all the bad things in my life happened."

"Trauma doesn't work like that, Deke." Fitz said as gently as he could.

Deke ran both his hands through his hair with a deep sigh. "I shouldn't have said anything." He stood up and turned to the door.

"Deke, wait." Jemma grabbed his left arm. "You don't have to forget everything about your past or reinvent yourself."

"But I want to." Deke said very clearly. "Kasius _owned_ me, and I don't want to feel like his property anymore."

Jemma made sure keep her voice calm, she didn't want to escalate this. "We've seen what he did, we know--"

"No, you _don't_ know." Deke snapped. "He literally owned me. After my dad was sent to the surface, Kasius and Sinara wanted to groom me into one of their deaf servants."

Jemma and Fitz looked at each other, then back at their grandson.

"You know what it's like." He looked to Jemma. "Having that-- that-- that _thing_ in my ear is one of the worst things that's ever happened to me."

"You've had it?" Jemmas voice went quiet. "How old were you?"

"I was fourteen." The fire in Dekes eyes never dampened. "So, forgive me if I want to forget that part of my life."

"Deke," Fitz said slowly, reaching out, "you don't need to keep going, we understand."

Deke sighed again, more aggressively, showing the frustration he was feeling. "Do you?" He asked. "You all were there for a few weeks, maybe. I was born there, raised there. I spent the first twenty-eight years of my life in that apocalyptic hellscape!" He gestured wildly around the room. "And I'm still here! Even when there's a rest of the world out there, I'm here, in the place I watched my whole family die."

"Deke . . ." neither grandparent knew how to handle this. It seemed that this was the first time he got to really talk about his past traumas in a serious way.

Deke sat down on one of the cots tiredly. "I watched you both die." He whispered, his eyes glassy with unshed tears. 

"What?!" Jemma was at his side in seconds, Fitz not far behind.

"When I was nine, Kasius got rid of everyone who believed in the prophecy. All the smart people." Deke forced himself to steady his breath and closed his eyes. "They killed everyone in the middle of the Exchange, to make an example." He looked up at Jemma, then Fitz, then at the concrete floor. "They took my mom, and my moms parents."

"I--" Fitz clenched his fists at his side. "I'm sorry, Deke." He said quietly. He lifted his hand and carefully, comfortingly, rubbed Dekes back between the shoulder blades. 

"We're going to make sure that world will never exist." Jemma promised. "So the next version of you to exist will never go through that."

Suddenly, Deke threw his arms around Jemma and Fitz. He pulled them into a tight hug and finally let the tears he had been holding in for God knows how long fall. Deke buried his face in the soft fabric of Fitz shirt as his shuddering breaths shook his whole frame. Both grandparents immediately returned the hug. It was a hug from a child who had lost his family too young, had been alone for too long.

As unconventional as this new family was, they loved each other. And this family kept their promises, no matter how far they need to go.


End file.
